1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the emulation of designs, and more specifically to emulating clocks with jitter.
2. Description of the Related Art
Emulators have been developed to assist circuit designers in designing and debugging highly complex integrated circuit designs (for example, a system on a chip (SOC)). An emulator includes multiple field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) or specific programmable emulation components that together can imitate the operations of an integrated circuit. By using an emulator to imitate the operations of an integrated circuit, designers can verify that the integrated circuit complies with various design requirements prior to fabrication.
An integrated circuit typically includes multiple components that operate on different clocks. Hence, the integrated circuit includes multiple clock domains. Signals routinely pass between different clock domains. During clock domain crossings, errors/anomalies may be introduced into the integrated circuit. One source of the errors could be the jitter present in the clock signals. For example, two clocks may be designed to operate at 1 GHz. However, because of jitter the likelihood that both clocks will be aligned (both operating at 1 GHz) is very small. Hence, when signals cross the clock domains, errors may occur because the clocks are not operating exactly as expected.
When an emulator emulates an integrated circuit, the clocks in the emulation environment are perfect clocks in that they start and end as designed (do not include jitter). Since the emulated clocks are not taking jitter into account, certain errors caused by jitter may not be detected when emulating the integrated circuit.